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Mathematics workshop attracts international specialists

January 04, 2006

Schmalz.thumb.jpgMathematicians from Europe and Asia, as well as from Australia and New Zealand, will soon travel to The University of New England for a ground-breaking workshop to be held there from the 7th to the 10th of February.

The workshop’s convener, Dr Gerd Schmalz from UNE’s School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, is hoping that the international meeting will initiate a series of similar events at universities around the country.

The subject of the workshop – "Several Complex Variables and CR Geometry" – is a field of higher mathematics in which Dr Schmalz (pictured here) is a specialist. He explained these techniques, developed by the nineteenth-century mathematicians Cauchy and Riemann (hence “CR”), as a way of using “complex” rather than “real” numbers to investigate and describe phenomena in multi-dimensional space. “Although these are ‘pure mathematics’ techniques,” Dr Schmalz said, “they have applications in physics – for example in special and general relativity.”

Dr Schmalz brought his expertise in Several Complex Variables (SCV) with him when he moved to UNE last February from the University of Bonn in Germany. He said he had brought with him, too, the idea of organising a workshop. This, with the support of his international colleagues and the collaboration of fellow UNE mathematician Dr Adam Harris, soon began to take shape.

While the workshop has attracted participants from overseas countries including South Korea and Russia, Dr Schmalz expects it to be followed by visits to UNE from Swiss, German and Swedish specialists in the subject. “SCV is a growing field in mathematics,” he said. “It is particularly popular in the United States, South Korea and Japan, as well as in a number of European countries. Australia, too, is developing a strong presence in the field, and the UNE workshop demonstrates that we now have the ability to attract leading international specialists to this country.”

Financial support from the Australian Mathematical Science Institute is covering the local expenses of the workshop participants, and could also help post-graduate students attend the meeting. “We are hoping that some of the participants will be able to bring post-graduate students with them,” Dr Schmalz said. “This might even include those from South Korea – a country that is seeing a particularly rapid development in science and mathematics.”

He explained that SCV was closely related to other fields of pure mathematics, including algebra, geometry, and partial differential equations. “The latter field will be the subject of another UNE workshop, being organised by Associate Professor Yihong Du, to be held in July this year,” he continued.


Media contact: Dr Gerd Schmalz on (02) 6773 3182 (e-mail: gerd@turing.une.edu.au), or Jim Scanlan (UNE Public Relations) on (02) 6773 3049.


Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 4, 2006 04:32 PM